Kawakami: On ‘hellafied athlete’ Jonathan Kuminga’s easy and auspicious return to Warriors

Jonathan Kuminga is a young man and still a very young player, but he’s enough of an NBA veteran to understand the tidal currents of a long season. And he’s enough of a wild card on this Warriors team to understand how much he can affect everything — for good or for chaos.

So Kuminga sat and watched what happened to the Warriors in the two months he missed with a severely sprained right ankle. He was right there, absorbing all the victories since Jimmy Butler’s arrival, waiting for his chance to get back on the court … and, yes, worrying a bit.

“It was just thinking when I come back I don’t want to mess things up — I don’t want to be the one,” Kuminga said with a grin after his return in Thursday’s easy victory over the Kings at Chase Center. “It’s just being nervous. Until you’re out there and you see everything is very easy.”

Will things always look as easy for Kuminga and the Warriors as they did in his return after missing 31 games? Probably not. There will be trouble spots for the team and 22-year-old dynamo. Even on Thursday, the Warriors got bogged down for a few minutes in the second quarter when they became far too anxious to set up Stephen Curry for his 4,000th career 3-pointer, and the Kings became way too aware of this. The Warriors eventually figured it out, Curry hit his milestone in the third quarter, the crowd went crazy, and everybody on the Warriors got back into the rhythm they’ve maintained since the early-February Butler trade. Including Kuminga, who didn’t look hurried, attacked the rim when the floor opened up, scored 18 points on 7-of-10 shooting, and just looked free-flowing and immensely dangerous to the opponent.

“He’s a hellafied athlete,” Butler said. “He’s a scorer. He wants to be great.”

All those things have been parts of the Kuminga dilemma in the past, of course. He’s so talented, as Steve Kerr puts it, that he’s capable of almost anything. The problem is picking among them. And sometimes it looked like Kuminga was trying to do all of them once.

But the Butler-era Warriors are a simplified team. They naturally run all the Stephen Curry classic movement stuff, but they also can get it to Butler whenever necessary and let him create something. And when Curry is out, Butler is the centerpiece and everybody works off of his creativity. Can Kuminga work within this framework, just cutting and dunking when the defenses over-tilt toward Curry and Butler? Well, yes.

“Not rushing,” Kuminga said when asked what his focus was in his return. “The nature of basketball when you come back [is that] you’re always going to try to rush and do extra things. And the way things are settled out there, you don’t really need to rush. You just have to be in the right position and things are going to go the way you want them to go.”

The Warriors are now 13-2 since Butler’s arrival and clearly do not need a rewiring. But Kuminga’s presence instantly made them deeper and stronger in about four different ways — he’s obviously their finisher at the rim and has been for several years, he immediately was given some of the toughest perimeter defensive assignments, and he gives them two or three fastbreak buckets every game because once he gets flying, nobody’s up there to stop him.

Butler is a new and more dynamic version of what Andre Iguodala used to give the Warriors. Kuminga, as always, is wholly unique. There is no previous model for what he can add — for the rest of this season and into the playoffs and well beyond that. Kerr’s primary determination was to make sure Kuminga was 100% ready for this; the Warriors’ season is going too well now to stop and wait for Kuminga to get up to speed or to work through any lingering ankle issues. By all evidence Thursday, Kuminga is at 100% health and 100% commitment to the Warriors’ new simplicity.

The more coherent it is for the Warriors, the more dangerous Kuminga gets.

“I think it gives you an automatic outlet,” Butler said of Kuminga’s presence. “He’s up there somewhere. Just toss it at the rim. And then you create plays knowing they’re going to overreact to Steph half the time, me, like, .001% of the time. That’s the guy that’s going to reap the benefits of that.”

Kerr’s eyeing a prime group of Curry, Draymond, Butler, and Kuminga, with the fifth spot filled by Moses Moody or Brandin Podziemski (when he returns from his minor back injury). That might not be the playoff starting lineup, but it sure might finish a lot of important games, including the ones coming up very soon.

The unit played only briefly Thursday because of Draymond’s foul trouble and because the game was a blowout late in the fourth quarter. But if it all blends together, it would be the Warriors’ most physical, athletic, and toughest lineup in a while. It’d be a very versatile defensive lineup. Also: a playoff-style lineup.

“You need that athleticism,” Draymond said. “You need that force that he plays with. The games are going to get more and more physical as we get down the stretch and into the playoffs. And (Kuminga) can match that physicality. He can also get downhill and use people’s physicality and pressure against them.

“We’ve been in a groove, but I don’t think there’s a soul in this building who thought just because we’re in a groove we don’t need him.”

Kuminga can use the space opened up by Curry and Butler and draw the defense, then kick out to a shooter or just keep it moving for Curry or somebody else to pop wide open. Or just get the ball and soar.

“What you notice is just the different dimension he gives us, with his explosion to the rim,” Kerr said. “The way teams are playing Steph, everybody now is top-locking him. It completely distorts the defense and it makes sense, because you’re trying to take away Steph. But then you don’t have help in certain areas.”

And a bonus: Kuminga can be the focal point of the offense if and when Curry or Butler are out.

Even as the Warriors struggled in December and January, Kuminga was playing some of the best basketball of his career before he suffered what he says is the worst injury of his career. All this while his name was mentioned in some trade discussions and while much of the NBA was curious about his upcoming restricted free agency in July.

There are always complicating issues with Kuminga. He’s so young. He’s so talented. He was on the 2022 championship team as a rookie afterthought. He was a big part of the Two Timelines Plan. He’s still here, in his fourth NBA season, and now he can be an integral part of a potentially long playoff run. Which obviously could lead to a huge contract from the Warriors or another team in the summer. Most likely from the Warriors, by the way.

But it still could get awkward with all that going on. It doesn’t feel like it’ll be awkward, though. It certainly was all good vibes when, in the fourth quarter, Gui Santos bounced a pass to a cutting Kuminga, who did a semi-double-pump chin-up on the rim.

Cue the broad smile.

“I think that’s the moment I realized I was out there with the group and everything was just going the right way,” Kuminga said.

That was just the first of three dunks for Kuminga in the final quarter. They all looked easy. It’s going to get harder for everyone pretty soon as the Warriors battle to hold onto the sixth seed and then wander into the postseason. But if everything works out right, Kuminga will keep on making some harder stuff look easy and the easy stuff look absolutely brilliant.